If you dig deep in any random farmer’s field or carpark in Britain, you’ll eventually find a Total War: Rome 2 trailer. They’re impressive too – shiny, dramatic and packed to the brim with tiny men of war. While I’m convinced that, at times, the game will be as attractive and grand as the videos suggest, I’m also aware that a great deal of the footage contains heavily edited historical battles rather than the kind of backwater skirmishes I usually find myself panning across from a distant vantage point that is actually tactically useful. The latest video shows the battle of the Teutoburg Forest, in which Germanic tribes ambushed Romans and total warred them to death.

Ambushes will be enhanced by the new true line-of-sight system, which presumably works a bit like the system in Company of Heroes 2, calculating line of sight from individual units and taking all terrain features into account. It’ll let people hide behind trees and rocks. That sort of thing.

As it happens I’ve been watching repeats on youtube recently. It’s surprisingly hard to pick the ones who are going to do well. A family with two youngish boys does really well while a group of army guys gets slaughtered. Generally though, it’s not usually a case of them being idiots as much as it is being inexperienced. Fairly glad my first battle wasn’t televised.

There’s also one episode where the team tries to take the fight to the enemy but are outnumbered and crushed and the experts are all like “No! You should have waited for them on the hill you fools!” In another episode the team decide to wait for the enemy on a hill and get slaughtered and the experts are all “Fools! Why did you wait on the hill. You should have taken the fight to them!”

Overall I find myself far more inclined to root for the team and hope they can somehow turn it around rather than laugh at them for failing a test there’s no real reason they should be able to pass.

OK, yeah, it does help if you’ve played the game before, granted. I guess the decision to choose randoms rather than experts in military history is that it’s more relateable that way, but it’s sort of the equivalent of televising the general public playing chess. Some people have some idea of what they’re doing, others will flail wildly and get fool’s-mated. The equivalent of watching the terrible acts on Pop Idol versus an actual concert, I suppose.

I do vaguely remember someone televising a high-level tabletop wargaming session, but I can’t remember anything other than that it was of a 1700s-1800s battle.

Speak for yourself. It’s the most engaging thing I’d ever seen since The Crystal Maze, and that’s saying something. Even to this day, catching re-runs of Crystal on that gameshow channel on Sky, I still find myself shrieking “NO, TURN THE BOX THE OTHER WAY YOU FOOL!”

Swampland, more like, still with a huge load of trees. Putting the Romans on an actual road though, that’s really wrong. Kind of diminishes the previous efforts to direct them to the small stretch of the forest that wasn’t crawling with the folks Arminius brought with him, but not yet unsteady swampland.
And the rest was slaughter and controlled chaos.

That’s good then. I’m expecting to sink 100s of hours into this, especially if they maintain the differences between each faction that made you want to play as all of them in the original. I hope the Selucid Empire is still in it, they were the best. One of the few criticisms I’d level at Shogun 2 was that the clans felt too similar.

I loved the Selucids, too. Probably the most diverse and interesting faction unit-wise. If I remember correctly, they also had a temple that held off squalor a bit, which was a godsend in that game. I remember flattening entire legions with chariots, before making the killing blow with cataphracts.

Siege battles have always been one of the weak spots in this series. The AI has never known how to counter a feint, so even in Shogun 2 it was easy to draw most of the defenders away from your real attack point.

Feints have also been a good way for the human player to break up the AI’s battle line in open field combat, resulting in individual units running around like chickens with their heads cut off. So, in addition to siege improvements, I hope that this time around, CA will figure out how to have an AI general that can keep his army together as a fighting force. The only way I’ve been able to enjoy prior TW games (and I did enjoy them), was to impose “house rules” about not exploiting the worst weaknesses of the tactical AI.

Ridiculous though it may have been, it was awesome. I was replaying Barbarian Invasion the other day and won the biggest battle I’ve ever fought in a TW game–my Alemanni town was being besieged by the entire Frankish horde, 10,000 or more. I dug in some first-tier spearmen and chosen archers at the town square (maybe 1800 total) and, outnumbered six to one, I wiped every last one of them out. Feels good.

Hudson. although Marvin`s article is impossible, last friday I got a new Ford after having earned $6200 this last 4 weeks and-also, $10k this past-month. it’s certainly the easiest job Ive ever had. I started this 8-months ago and straight away brought home more than $73 per/hr. I use this website,, http://www.pie21.com

Been smashing out a Rome game to get me in the mood for this. Great fun. I’d never really gone into Greece before, preferring the Julii and friends up north…there’s so much money! What do I do with all this money?!??